The 140 character microblogging platform Twitter is gaining popularity by each passing day. Geek or no-geek, everybody seems to be hooked up to Twitter, which looks like a good-for-no-use application when it was started.

And with its popularity, it is natural that the dark side of the Internet also get attracted towards it. Today Twitter is accused of spreading malware links just because of its use of URL Shortening services. The use of URL shortening is imperative for Twitter because it has to provide a mechanism to its user for squeezing as much information as possible within its 140 character limit.

But shortened URL pose a huge security risk, because you never know where you will land up when you click on a shortened URL.

Twitter, now blocking the Malware contained URL

Recently Twitter has started blocking the tweets, which contain the URL to malware distributing website. To test this feature, I selected a known dangerous website, http://gianttopdiscover.cn.

Please do not attempt to open this website, if you are not using a secured and updated web browser.

This is what I got, when I opened it with my Firefox 3.5.1.

To test, whether Twitter is able to block this malware URL or not, I tried to tweet an update like…”Just Testing…Don’t go to gianttopdiscover.cn.

Happy to note that my tweet was effectively blocked by Twitter and this is what I got.

Nice beginning.

But it is understood that if the malware URL is already a shortened URL or using a redirect script, then this protection may not work.

[Check out the latest blog posts from Silki about malware scanning with boot disks and private internet browsing.]